“Aristotle,” said Thea, “was a mere maker of lists. Plato was a philosopher.”
“Plato lacked a system.” Alf closed his book, rose and stretched.
Thea watched him from her corner of the window niche. “A philosopher has to have a system?”
“If he wants to capture the fancy of the schoolmasters.”
“And you?”
“I prefer Plato.” He sat down again, close but not touching, and took up his book. “I’m illogical, old-fashioned, and very probably a heretic.”
“Very probably,” she agreed. “I’m tired of the Categories. Where’s the book you found in Master Dionysios’ library?”
“The Plato? In my room. Shall I fetch it?”
“Let me.” She set it in his lap, snatched out of air. Their hands touched; his withdrew quickly. He opened the book more quickly still.
His eyes ran over the words, but his mind reflected Thea’s face. He stole a glance at her. She sat with knees drawn up, head cocked to one side, waiting. A difficult pupil, she; lethally quick-witted and well aware of it, acknowledging him her master but allowing him not an instant’s rest upon his laurels.
She would catch him now if he did not bring his mind to order. But it would not shape itself as he willed it. He watched his hand stretch out to trace the curve of her cheek.
She smiled with the familiar touch of mockery. “Was that in your book?”
“Dreams,” he said, “are shadows of the life we live, and life a shadow of the Reality.”
“Have your dreams been strange of late?”
“My body is seventeen years old. My mind in sleep follows it and it alone. What are six decades of philosophy in the face of that?”
“What use is philosophy at all? Except to keep dry old men busy and to put young ones to sleep, where they dream of love and wake to foolish shame.”
“My teaching bores you then? Do you want to end it?” He managed to sound both eager and regretful.
She laughed and weighed their two books in her hands, Plato and Aristotle. “Bored? I? How could I be? You’re the best of teachers, and you know it. But I’m a poor philosopher. All those wordy old men with their heads in the clouds…even Socrates, who knew a thing or two of the world, what was he doing but escaping his termagant of a wife and finding excuses for his poverty?”
“There’s more to the world than what we see.”
“Who should know that better than I? And I like to give my mind a bit of exercise. But I can’t look at all those sober speculations in the proper light. If you and I are only shadows, or faulty conglomerations of the four elements, or a dance of atoms in the void, why is life so sweet?”
“To you perhaps it is.”
“And to you it isn’t? Humans have trapped you, little Brother. They live a little while, bound in flesh that must decay; some do the world a bit of good, but most, like angry children, destroy as much of it as they can before they’re snatched away. Or they make up stories about the foulness of flesh to convince themselves that they don’t want to stay in it. They forget how to live, and say that God, or the gods, or the Demiurge, or whatever power you will, set them here to test them and prove them worthy of an afterlife. Or else, and worst of all, they deny that there is any meaning in anything, and give themselves up to despair.”
“Would you rather that no one thought on his fate at all?”
“Too much of anything is dangerous. Look at you. The monks made you in their own image, and taught you to shrink from the world. Maybe they were made for Heaven, but you weren’t.”
“Then I must have been made for Hell.”
She glared at him. “Don’t talk like a fool. You were made for earth, which stands precisely between. And which means that you can reach for both. Heaven if you live as you were meant to live, in full realization of what you are. And Hell if you deny any part of yourself.”
“If I turn my power loose, I can destroy the world.”
“That’s arrogance, and a denial of your conscience. We are gifted with one, you know. Or cursed, if you prefer.”
“We, you say. What are we? Changelings, say people in Anglia. But all the legends tell of human children stolen and monsters set in their places, troll-brats or mindless images that shrivel away with the dawn. Not elf-children of the true blood.”
“Who’s to say what real elf-children are like? Maybe we are monsters, too hideous or too incomplete to be endured, or else miserable hybrids whom none of our lofty kin would acknowledge. Though I’ve talked with beings of the otherworld, ghosts, and once a demon; and I’ve heard tell of one of us who met a Power under a hollow hill. None of them could or would tell us what we are. Maybe we really are changelings. Maybe we’re God’s joke on humankind. Maybe we don’t exist at all. Who knows? There are only a few of us that I know of, and those few have all gone to Rhiyana or known its King.”
“Gwydion, for all his wisdom, knows no more than you or I.”
“Yet you asked me, woman that I am, and anything but royal. I’m flattered.”
“I was shouting in the dark.”
“And avoiding the main issue as usual. Your body isn’t as easy to distract as your mind is. When are you going to listen to it?”
“When it stops bidding me to sin.”
“Is love a sin?”
“Love, no. This is lust.”
“Can you be so sure of that?”
That was her essence: to shake the foundations of his world. He unclenched his fists, took the books from her, rose. “I can’t separate the two when I think of you, but I will do it. Then we shall see.”
“Then you shall no longer have me to trouble you.”
She spoke so quietly and so calmly that she frightened him. He moved by instinct, closer to her; standing over her, looking down into her face. The books weighed him down; he willed them away and set his hands upon her shoulders. So thin she was, all brittle bones like a bird. She had had no more sleep or food or peace of mind than he had.
Without conscious thought, he bent and kissed her. She responded with more warmth than he had looked for or dared to hope.
“Yes, damn you,” she said angrily, “I love you, God help me. Love you, lust for you, and snatch with shameful eagerness at any crumb you deign to drop in front of me.”
He stroked the smooth softness of her hair. She closed her eyes and shivered. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Oh, damn you.”
He knelt face to face with her and took her cold hands. “Marry me, Thea,” he said.
Her eyes opened wide. He met them, baring his mind to her, all defenseless. I mean it, he said. I want it. Marry me.
Her eyes, then her hand, freed from his, explored his face. Her fingers tangled in his hair. “I love you,” she said.
He waited, heart hammering, unable to breathe.
“I love you,” she repeated, speaking carefully, “but I don’t want to marry you.”
His heart stopped. All the blood drained from his face.
She played with his hair, smoothing it, stroking it. “You want me almost as badly as I want you. But you’re afraid of the sin. Marriage, you think, will take away both the sin and the fear. You don’t see yet that words mean nothing; that love, not a priest’s mumbling, is the sacrament.”
“I do see it,” he said in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
“Only with your eyes. In your mind, Alfred of Saint Ruan’s, you’re still in your cloister, though the Pope has given you a writ that says the opposite. And I won’t marry a monk.”
For a long while he knelt there under her hand. Little by little his heart went cold. She saw it; he watched the dismay grow in her eyes. But she said, “I would be your lover if you were the Lord Pope. Your wife I cannot and will not be.”
He rose slowly. He understood now why she had flown from him in Petreia. But her anger had been fiery hot. His was ice-cold. “I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said. “I have offended you. I shall not repeat my error.” He bowed with careful correctness and began to turn away.
“Alf!” she cried.
He turned back. She faced him, and he saw a stranger, a woman beautiful in her anger, who after all meant nothing to him.
Her own passion froze; her head came up, her chin set. “No,” she said, “do not offend me again.”
Once more he bowed. This time she did not try to prevent his leaving.